Those skilled in the art are continually looking for new compositions which do not exhibit gelling to use as curatives in epoxy resin applications. Also, compositions which can be prepared under mild conditions from commonly available reactants are extremely desirable. If such compositions predictably add certain desirable properties to the cured product, there will be a substantial demand for these compositions.
It is known in the art to react polyoxyalkylene amines with various compounds to produce epoxy curing agents, but it appears to be previously undisclosed in the art to react an acid terminated amide intermediate with a polyethylene glycol diamine or with a secondary isopropyl derivative of a polyethylene glycol diamine.
The preparation of the secondary isopropyl amine derivative used as a reactant in one embodiment of this invention is described in copending U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 07/322,020, 07/322,021 and 07/264,643. These applications disclose methods for preparing secondary isopropyl amine derivatives of polyoxyethylene and/or polyoxypropylene primary diamines or triamines with acetone in the presence of a hydrogenation catalyst and hydrogen.
It would be useful in the art to prepare a variety of ungelled compositions useful as epoxy curing agents which could be designed with properties tailored to certain requirements. In addition it would be desirable if a new series of high molecular weight amine terminated amides with the above-identified properties could be prepared by means of a simple coupling reaction.